Character Design for Animation

Apart from the story aspect of a character, the design aspect plays a very important role. The shapes & volumes used while designing the character and the poses & expressions of a character; all this information helps us to create the right attitude for the character design.

An attribute of a character refers to its characteristics. One has to keep in mind how the character is going to perform in the film and its behavior in the story. Drawing a character, keeping the above things in mind; will add more life to the character.

Some of the basic things that one needs to know about the characters are:
• Age,
• Moods and
• Behavior patterns (whether the character is happy, excited, sad or evil).

Once we know about this information we can make the audience connect with our character.
Few reminders:

• While drawing a character one of the most important aspects is its proportions.
What is the proportion of your character in comparison to the world that he belongs to?
• The silhouette of a character and the shapes used to draw the character defines the volumes of our character.
• Also the volumetric study of a character is very important from the animation point of view as well as it becomes a reference for the animator to keep the consistency in his drawings while designing the character several times.

While creating the design its better to exaggerate the proportions as it is easy to stylize the character. This also helps animating the character efficiently as we can explore the extremes and exaggerations of the actions in a better way.